For Better, Worse, Or Divorce Podcast

In this episode, Brian Walters meets Bill Eddy, the co-founder of the High Conflict Institute and a renowned expert and author on high-conflict personalities. They delve into the complexities of family law cases involving high-conflict personalities and offer insights and strategies for navigating these challenging situations.

Our team is experienced in the nuances of family law matters involving complex and high-conflict situations. We understand that these cases require a strategic approach. We can guide you on the legal steps and a long-term plan that may look good for your family and peace of mind. Schedule a consultation to discuss a family law matter with an attorney. If there is a topic you would like to hear on our podcast, email us.

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Your hosts have earned a reputation as fierce and effective advocates inside and outside of the courtroom. Both partners are experienced trial attorneys who have been board certified in family law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization.

Brian Walters: Thank you for tuning into the For Better, Worse, or Divorce podcast, where we provide you tips and insights on how to navigate divorce and child custody situations in the state of Texas.

I’m Brian Walters. I’m joined today by Bill Eddy, who’s a lawyer, therapist, mediator, and co-founder of the High Conflict Institute. That’s a lot more things than I’m involved in. Bill developed a high conflict personality theory and has become an international expert on managing disputes involving high conflict personalities and personality disorders.

He’s also the author of several books, a few of which we’ll be discussing today. Including BIFF, which is for co-parenting communication. BIFF Quick Responses for High Conflict People, and the most recent book which was published earlier this year, BIFF For Lawyers and Law Offices. Welcome Bill and we are excited to have you with us today.

Bill Eddy: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Brian Walters: Thank you. You want to tell us a little bit more about your background? I gave you a quick intro, but I know there’s much more to it than that.

Bill Eddy: Probably the two key things is that for 12 years I was a child and family therapist in outpatient clinics and psychiatric hospitals. Then I became a family lawyer in 1993, which is now 30 years ago.

The combination of the two led me to looking at mental health issues in the legal context. As I practiced family law it became clear that much of what happens, especially in family court, is related to mental health issues that often aren’t understood.

That’s where personality disorders come in because there’s something that people aren’t really familiar with and yet, it helps explain where people get stuck. People may have a personality disorder and they may have traits of that. That really feeds conflict a lot because people just don’t understand what’s going on.

Brian Walters: I agree with you. I don’t know the exact statistics, but I’m thinking about the major counties I practiced in Texas. But it’s always a few cases that take up an extraordinary percentage of the total. I know back when I was in Austin in the 2000s, I had a theory that I’m not sure what the number of borderline personality disorder folks are, it’s not many. But they seem to take up about 25% of the court’s time, even though they’re probably 1 or 2% of the population or whatever the numbers are. That’s just me. I didn’t have anything scientific or empirical, that was just me being a family law litigator.

I’ve been on both sides of it. I’ve had the folks who were having to deal with a spouse, a parent or partner that had one of those mental health issues and I’ve also represented some of them. It’s a very interesting concept for me practically and I think it’ll help explain to some of the people listening to this podcast what’s going on. Let me start at the beginning with one quick thing, which is BIFF, B-I-F-F. I referenced that in some of the titles. Tell us what that is and then define what it is as well.

Bill Eddy: BIFF simply stands for brief, informative, friendly, and firm. In 2007 that came up. I was asked by a couple of judges what to do about these terrible email conversations that they read in court. I said because I had a background in counseling I’d already been counseling my law clients to be brief, informative, friendly, and firm, but I hadn’t put it together.

I said well, I need to be brief, like a paragraph. Even if you’re getting a page or two, just a paragraph’s usually sufficient. Informative, just straight information. Not arguments, opinions, emotions, defenses, all of that, just straight information. The who, what, where, and when of things.

Then there should be a friendly tone. Now people say, “How can I be friendly when they’ve just called me rotten and a jerk and worse things?” The reality is you actually can. You can decide how you’re going to respond, and the way you respond may influence the other person to be more upset or to be more calm. By being friendly, it just tones things down a little bit.

Firm doesn’t mean harsh, it just means that you end the hostilities and that you come up with a conclusion. Many of the best BIFF responses don’t get any further response because there’s nothing more to be said and you’re not feeding the conflict. It’s brief, informative, friendly, and firm.

Brian Walters: I agree, and I think that makes a lot of sense. It’s really interesting to have it put that way, but it’s true. Not only in dealing with family law matters, but probably dealing with all kinds of high conflict or difficult situations.

That’s often hard. It’s just like you said, you get a page and a half email that basically says you’re a horrible parent and your kids hate you. The only thing that’s really a question is one of the kids is sick. Are we going to do our normal exchange?

You’re right, you don’t want to go with a page and a half response. Which is not only going to help the situation but I can tell you in a court it’s not going to be helpful either. These judges’ eyes are going to glaze over when they start reading 20 pages about a one-hour change in a visitation schedule or something like that.

Bill Eddy: Yeah.

Brian Walters: Let’s talk about each one of these books a little bit in order. The BIFF For Co-Parent Communication, the first one I have on my list. I started to talk about that briefly, but tell me a little bit more about some effective strategies for dealing with a co-parent who’s got issues and problems. The other parent you’re dealing with is a really difficult person. How can they try to co-parent with this type of person?

Bill Eddy: A lot of co-parenting today does go through email and text messages. By using the BIFF approach, not only can the person help themselves stay calm and not spend hours and hours obsessing about it. Just keeping it brief also does influence the other person. I think of a lawyer who told me recently, “My client’s been writing with the BIFF format for the last three months and gets all this angry stuff, but now the other side’s starting to write back in the same format and I don’t think he realizes it’s a method.” His client calms both ends of the conversation by just consistently doing BIFF.

Here’s an interesting thing with that book. I had two co-authors, Annette Burns and Kevin Chafin. One thing that Kevin came up with is take the email you receive and rewrite that as a BIFF. You may have two pages of anger. Just cross out the stuff that doesn’t relate to anything that needs a response. Just find what in here needs a response. You might find that there’s 20 sentences and only one asks a question. So you cross out all the others and then just respond to that one. Then you’re calmer and it’s easier to formulate a response.

It’s a clever approach, but overall I think that using the BIFF method also influences how people talk to each other and that the phone conversations or in-person exchanges are much easier to be a little more restrained because they’re used to doing BIFF responses. Just being brief, informative, friendly, and firm in all their interactions tends to lower the heat. Let’s say you have someone with some personality difficulties, it tends to make them less defensive so you don’t get as much bad behavior from them sometimes.

Brian Walters: That’s probably something to talk about next is understanding these high conflict personalities. To me, the first thing is it’s not a binary thing. In other words, somebody is either high conflict or not. There’s probably a spectrum and it’s probably a normal distribution, what we call a bell curve for most people and you’ve got a couple of people on the extreme end, but they’re not. I think as you just said, it does depend on how you deal with them to some degree.

If somebody’s just so broken that there’s no way to deal with them then it may not matter. In that case, you just probably have to go to court and get the judge to say they’re not going to be involved in parenting. I think that’s a relatively small number of people. I think there’s a lot of very difficult people out there and obviously in the middle of a high stress, high conflict situation like a divorce or custody battle, they’re going to probably be on their worst behavior.

Tell us a little bit about understanding high conflict personalities. We’re not trying to excuse behaviors here, we’re just trying to understand what we’re dealing with to be able to deal with it most effectively.

Bill Eddy: High-conflict personalities are really a description of behavior. It’s not a diagnosis, but maybe half the people with a high-conflict personality may have a personality disorder. You’re absolutely right, there’s a real continuum. For some people, it’s more severe, for other people, it’s less severe. What we have to realize is the way we interact with them influences whether we’re bringing out the best or the worst behavior. That’s why you can have a difficult co-parent and yet manage the relationship.

The four characteristics that we consistently see with high conflict personalities is a pattern of blaming behavior. They’re always seeing it’s somebody else’s fault. Included in that is they can’t see their part in the problem. It’s actually rather sad because if you see your part in the problem, you can change that and often solve problems. But if you can’t see your own part in the problem, then you don’t try changing anything and problems persist. 

All or nothing thinking is a second common characteristic. They think it’s all your fault, but they also think in terms of all or nothing solutions. It has to be my way and there’s only one way it can be. They lack the flexibility to see many options. We like to say that there’s more than one solution to every problem, but they often can’t see that.

A third is unmanaged emotions. Some people show this. They may yell or burst into tears. I give seminars to judges as well and I ask how many have had somebody run out of the courtroom in the middle of their own hearing? Usually about half the judges raise their hand. One day one of the judges said, “Bill, the other half are new and that’s why they hadn’t seen that.” The emotions take over. It’s not logical and they often regret it afterwards, but the emotions take over. Some people don’t show that. They look very calm, cool, and reasonable, yet they’re very rigid and the emotions are driving them under the surface.

The last is extreme behaviors. Here’s where we get domestic violence, people hiding money, people hiding children, people lacking empathy for the children and the other parent. And just stuck on what they’re doing. And also lying. We see that and I think it is becoming more and more common in family courts. And more common in family courts than just about anywhere else in the world.

I want to mention a couple other things here. One is the personality disorders, which may be half of high-conflict people who are considered by the research to be about 10% of the adult population. And this may be worldwide, looking at studies from different countries. The DSM, the diagnostic manual says about 10% of adults. That’s a significant number, especially when you think that people with alcoholism may be about 7% of the population, but it shows up mostly in close relationships. That’s why most people are unaware of this. They don’t understand the dynamics. But we see it in family law because that’s close relationships.

The thing about personality disorders is that they lack self-awareness. They don’t see their part in problems and they don’t change. They have an enduring pattern of behavior. That’s one of the things that really makes it hard to deal with because judges like to give lectures, lawyers like to give lectures, and therapists like to admonish their clients. But this may be something they’re born with, or something from child abuse in the early childhood. Or maybe indulgence, they got away with everything. That’s a nutshell of high-conflict personalities.

Brian Walters: That’s really interesting. I didn’t think the numbers were that high. It makes sense when you think about it, 10%. If there’s two people in a  divorce or custody case, that’s around 20% chance that one of them is going to be. I’m not a statistician, but that sounds about right.

Some smaller number that would indicate both of them are high-conflict, maybe a couple percentage chance. And when you overlay the 7% alcoholism, which may include some of the same people, maybe double counting. Then I also think about other types of substance abuse. I see a lot of prescription med abuse, some illegal drug use, generally not in the cases I handle that much, but more prescriptions.

The chances of there being one of those things in a case, either a substance abuse problem, a high conflict personality or something, it’s got to be north of 25% chance that there’ll be one of those in a case if I’m doing my math even remotely correct, which I think I am.

Bill Eddy: One thing I want to jump in and say is if a client thinks that their spouse has a personality disorder and they say my husband’s a narcissist, or my wife’s a borderline, we admonish them. We don’t talk about that to anybody else. Because if you tell your spouse that and it’s true, they’re going to be very defensive. And if it’s not true, they’re going to be very defensive. People don’t like to be labeled.

If you use those terms in court, judges don’t like to hear people diagnosing each other and people aren’t trained. The other thing, and you touched on this, is if there’s one person, say with a personality disorder in a couple, there may be maybe a 50% chance that the other person also has a personality disorder. It’s not always the case, but it’s sometimes the case. So if you tell everybody your husband has a narcissistic personality disorder, many professionals;  lawyers, therapists, and judges are going to go huh, I wonder if you do too.

That’s why you should not talk about that in public. Don’t label your partner. You can talk about the patterns of behavior, what your concerns are, and those can get talked about in court. Someone’s always yelling, throwing things or things like that. But labeling is something we really discourage people from doing. Just have your private working theory and be careful with what you do if you think the other person has these characteristics.

Brian Walters: That makes a lot of sense to me as well. Let’s talk about your newest book, which is for lawyers and law offices. I’m sure there’s some lawyers or others who listen to this, but obviously anybody who’s listening to this podcast has probably either got a lawyer or is considering getting a lawyer for a family law matter. Let’s talk a little bit about that book and also how that is going to affect a lawyer and their law offices dealing with clients or potential clients. That might be most helpful to the folks on this podcast.

Bill Eddy: There’s really two reasons for this book. One is that lawyers often get into arguments with difficult clients or even reasonable clients who are dealing with a difficult co-parent. They may just yell out at their lawyer or say angry things in writing. We want to help lawyers be able to respond to clients without getting emotionally hooked like that.

If a client says, “You didn’t send me the settlement proposal. You’ve had it for a week. My wife’s lawyer’s had it, all of that, and I never got it. You’re a jerk, you’re irresponsible, unprofessional,” all these things. A good response, and we have it in the book, is, “My assistant was out sick last week and this was an oversight. Here it is now and let me know when you’ve read it and are ready to discuss it,” period. That way they don’t get into the whole argument. Yes, I am responsible and whatever. You just explain what happened and solve the problem. Triggering defensiveness is very common and to help lawyers see you don’t have to have a defensive response.

We’ve got about 30 example conversations in the BIFF for lawyers book, also the BIFF for co-parents book has about 30 examples. So people can see all different types of situations. Another reason for this is lawyer-to-lawyer correspondence. I’m sure for you, where I am, we have regular continuing education. It’s not unusual to have someone say, “Here’s the latest rotten conversations, and folks, please cut it out and be civil.” You’re exposed to how lawyers can be hostile with each other.

I do training for law firms at times and that’s one of the things they really want. How do we tone down these conversations? We wanted to have lawyer-to-lawyer correspondence, so we have a lot of examples. If it’s minor issues, major issues, how you can respond if someone says, “Where’d you go to law school? You don’t know what you’re doing. How could you be so cruel?,” Or, “How could you be so blind?” Or one of these things and just to respond, what’s the information that needs to go back and forth?

I think most lawyers have had some experience with that, and this should give them some words they can use. It just takes one person to calm the conversation and you get to feel good about yourself rather than getting down in the mud.

Brian Walters: I think both of those things would be of interest to someone listening to the podcast. I’ll start in reverse order, which is with the lawyer-to-lawyer communication. That’s actually a really interesting subject.

I remember when I started practice in Austin there was a very good lawyer there. That was a lot of her MO or schtick. She would write these long letters to opposing counsel, your client did this and your client did that. 

She’s a very intelligent and very professional lawyer. She never made it personal toward the other lawyer unless it was something like you were late in filing this or whatever. Generally, lawyers hate writing those things. First they take a lot of time, they are details about who didn’t have the kid’s clothes clean for the weekend or whatever. Things that most people don’t want to deal with, but you do it. This was a major part of her success because as a lawyer, when you get a letter like that, you have to send it to your client. Then the client would get this letter and it would be like 18 things horrible about them that they’re reading.

They get the letter on Friday afternoon and smoke would come out of their ears for the whole weekend. Then they’d call their lawyer up on Monday morning and want to complain about it, and say you need to write a letter back that’s twice as long. And as typical lawyers, they wouldn’t call them back until Thursday and then wouldn’t get a letter out until the next week, which was not right. Anyway, it was a ridiculous thing. It’s not evidence. All it did was churn fees in my opinion, it didn’t help anything. But she was very good at it. She was very detail oriented and excellent at doing it. It would always make the other side think the other lawyers are better than mine.

I was amazed by it. I’ve never done that and I don’t want to do that either, but it was interesting. She did it in a way that was really effective, but she didn’t personalize it. She never got in trouble with the courts because the judge would read the letter and be like “This is about your client’s behavior. This is about you. You were late and you missed a deadline.” That was interesting. I would say to folks, listen to these things. If you get a letter like that from the other lawyer, or your lawyer’s writing those kinds of things, it’s probably not worth worrying about, but that’s hard to say.

The second part is the lawyer to client communication. What she says is really straight on. I do have a question though. In my practice I have a big firm with a lot of employees, and I have a real hard-line rule that if a client is abusive, threatening or anything like that toward us, anybody in the firm or just in general, they’re gone.

Now, I didn’t have that rule when I was an attorney. I could deal with it myself and I’d fire some people if I really thought it was off. I’d be like whatever, I can deal with this person. Maybe that’s me trying to be protective of my employees, but maybe there’s a more subtle way to deal with that. Where we can still be protective of our employees, but not necessarily throwing a client overboard who’s just having a problem, having a bad day or worded something in an email that came across the wrong way. Is there a way to walk that line, or do you think we should just be just really strict about that?

Bill Eddy: Yes, definitely. Our approach as much as possible is to train everybody in a law firm in dealing with high conflict people in BIFF responses and such. We’ve trained at some law firms where they’ve had that happen. We’ve had 25 people in a room and we’ve talked about the BIFF method as one of the basic skills. I’ve done some of this on Zoom.

First of all, get to know a little bit about high conflict personalities. They may have been born this way, or have been a victim of early child abuse and things like that. They may lack awareness and really not be operating out of calculation to make your life miserable, it just feels that way. Giving them some tools and some patience may help save some clients from having to fire them.

There’s always going to be some people that you just can have no impact with and we understand that. One thing we say if you terminate with a client is don’t blame the client and don’t blame yourself. Because either way, you’re going to escalate things. Just recognize there’s differences or incompatibilities. I think that it’s possible to train everybody in some of the basic skills.

We have what we call ear statements also, which is empathy, attention, and respect. A statement that says I know you’re having a hard time today, now let’s look at what your options are. Things like that, rather than getting into an unnecessary argument. We’re actually training in the workplace in general now. A lot of workplaces are seeing high conflict behavior, not just the legal field. We’re working on a book about that now for business customer representatives. Our goal is to teach the world about some basic skills to keep the conversations calm and not get hooked by these folks because they really don’t really understand themselves.

Brian Walters: I think that’s the main point. Obviously there are some people who are jerks and there are some people that really have problems. It’s sad and it’s difficult to deal with them for sure. In many of the cases, some of the saddest people are the most annoying. They really don’t understand their own behaviors or their own responsibility. They’re very unhappy people is what I’ve seen really underneath.

Anyway, that’s all we have time for today. I can’t thank Bill enough for taking his valuable time to join us today. We have this information listed on our podcast in the description below and links where you can purchase his books or contact him if needed. Thanks again, Bill, for spending some time with us.

Bill Eddy: Thank you for the opportunity.

Brian Walters: Thank you.

For information about the topics covered in today’s episode and more, you can visit our website at waltersgilbreath.com. Thanks for tuning into today’s episode of For Better, Worse, or Divorce, where we post new episodes every first and third Wednesday.

Do you have a topic you want discussed or a question for our hosts? Email us at podcast@waltersgilbreath.com. Thanks for listening. Until next time